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by zevets 263 days ago
Julia's choice to encourage people naming their variables greek letters is bad though. There's a whole group of students who struggle with the symbols, but understand the concepts (a residual). Julia, when used to its full capabilities, gains an enormous amount of its power from a huge amount of clever abstractions. But in the 1st-course-in-numerical-methods class context, this can be more offputting than the "why np?" stuff this article mentions.

For teaching linear algebra, MATLAB is unironically the best choice - as the language was originally designed for that exact purpose. The problem is that outside of a numerical methods class, MATLAB is a profound step backwards.
3 comments
int_19h 263 days ago
If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols, it'll be difficult for them to deal with lots of math and physics where this is the standard notation. Intuitively it feels that the best thing that the language can do here is to enable notation that is the closest to the underlying math.
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hulitu 263 days ago
> If students struggle with the use of Greek letters as symbols

After using Character map or other "user friendly" methods to enter Greek letters as symbols on a computer, i would say, yes, people struggle with the use of Greek letters. Unless, of course, one has a Greek keyboard.

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syockit 257 days ago
I always install WinCompose specifically for this. Then a Greek letter is as simple as pressing Compose with *, followed by the related Roman letter. Though I still struggle to remember which key maps to which for the letters with no real 1-to-1 mapping (like theta).
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pavon 263 days ago
Whatever language you choose, you are only going to be teaching a subset of it anyway, so just ignore the Unicode identifier support. I code in Julia professionally, and never use it.
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bouchard 262 days ago
Using greek symbols as public-facing function arguments, etc. is definitely not recommended, and not that common (at least in my experience).

It's best used for internal calculations where the symbols better match the actual math, and makes it easier to compare with the original reference.

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